Go to school, don’t play a fool.

Joshua Lim
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

A retrospective on the redesign of a University website’s information architecture.

When I thought I was done with school

Never have I fully comprehended how notorious University websites are for their information architecture until now. I knew they were far from the great libraries that you could find in these institutions in terms of structure and categorization. However, in reality, navigating through these sites could make one feel like you’re looking for a turtle in a school of sardines


Our ball of yarn

The NUS Business school website was the ball of yarn that my partner Zack and I were tasked to untangle within the span of two weeks. To kick things off, Zack and I started on our business analysis of the school, followed by a heuristic evaluation of the site.

Business analysis

Through detailed reads and the opening of various other articles written about the school that we could find, we soon came to an understanding of what NUS Business school is all about.

Experience.

For a business school that has only 53 years under its belt, it sure is some crazy rich 53 years of experience that we have seen here. This relatively young school has certainly made it’s mark fast on the global stage. With that, it’s certainly is a sign of the quality of students that this institution has been able to produce. As well as the dedication that the school pours onto her students.

Which brings us to understand that the NUS Business experience is certainly one that is unique. It is the bridge that the school builds to the students. However, in a day and age where technology is very much involved with education, the school’s website has become a pivotal pillar in the shaping the experience of the student’s educational journey.

Competitive Analysis

Upon attaining a better understanding of the school, we placed NUS against two of it’s competitors (INSEAD & SMU) in a competitive analysis.

The analysis was structured in seeing how each school’s website faired in providing to the needs of three different personas as well as the ease of using the sites.

The three persons are:
John a working professional looking for courses that could help his professional career.

Mark a perspective student who’s looking to enrol into a bachelors’ programme

Jessica a current student who need to sign up for courses

in summary, we concluded that SMU’s site catered really well for the personas of Mark and Jessica. While Insead’s Site catered really well for John’s persona. Where does that leave NUS Business school then. Unfortunately, NUS fell back a little against it’s competitors as the site’s information were as well hidden as the Crouching Tiger’s best friend, the Hidden Dragon.

Heuristic Evaluation

Which brings us to taking a deeper look into our heuristic evaluation based upon the Jakob Nelson’s 10 usability heuristic for User Interface Design of the site itself.

However, we adapted the evaluation to the scoring of red flags in each category, where the higher the score equates to more problems in that particular heuristic. From the evaluation, we could tell that the site suffers from two main areas. Particularly in consistency and flexibility of use.

Getting a bigger picture

We started to plot out the sitemap of the current site and we came to realise how much of a mammoth the project is proving itself to be.

Inside–outside–team–work–makes–the–dream–work–card sorting

Following which, we started with our card sorting.

We conducted the card sorting process with an internal sorting amongst ourselves to shortlist the cards that we found were important and to create groupings. After which, we conducted an open sort to validate our assumptions as well as to see if there are any new categories that could be used. With that we managed to cross reference and confirmed the groupings that were validated, we then held a hybrid card sort that helped us to to gather further data that helped us in the categorisation of our information.

Tree Testing

With that we were able to form up a tree testing where we would be able to see if the structured categories for information and navigation made sense to the users.

After analysing the results we were able to see some of the kinks and fine tune the structure of our information further.

Wire Framing & Usability testing

Working with the information we had, we headed on to work on our sketches and Wire Frames. Which we used as our prototype for usability testing.

Heading straight on with our usability testing, we were pleasantly surprised that out of all 5 tasks our candidates were able to complete 4 on an average. While at the same time, the tasks were also completed relatively faster on an average.

However, candidates were still unable complete the task in finding out answers to childcare services. Upon more inquiry, we identified that the problem lied in the naming of the page as well as where it was located.

Hence, we decided to rename what was previously known as FAQ to student support services. Which was placed under the category of student resources.

Final designs

With that we were now ready to develop our final designs.

Try out the web or mobile prototype for yourself.

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